Anchorage Daily News

News for Tuesday, May 29
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A leaked memo says the Alaska Zoo’s board ignored experts’ advice on Maggie. With the zoo’s board of directors scheduled to meet today to discuss whether to send the state’s only elephant to a sanctuary in the Lower 48, APRN has a story based on what it describes as an internal board memo that has been obtained and released by a California group called In Defense of Animals. The network’s report says seven of eight experts consulted by the board in 2004 recommended moving the elephant to a warmer climate and the company of other elephants. One scientist said Maggie could remain in Anchorage, APRN’s story says, “provided the zoo add rubber flooring to her pen, give her a way to exercise, and have the staff give her 16 hours a day of behavioral enrichment.” Three years later, according to the APRN’s story, there’s no soft flooring, and Paul Joslin, a wildlife biologist and member of the group “Friends of Maggie,” calls the elephant’s specially designed exercise treadmill “an absolute disaster.”

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The frontier of climate change starts in Newtok. The New York Times sets its latest piece on the practical effects of global warming in the Bering coast village of Newtok, where residents contend with melting permafrost, tilting houses and storms that threaten to wash to place away within a few years. Like several other Alaska villages, Newtok is hoping to move to a safer area, but that’s an expensive proposition. “I don’t want to live in permafrost no more,” Frank Tommy told the paper. “Everything is crooked around here.” Photographer Charles Mason of Fairbanks took the pictures.

Alaska Magazine takes a broader view, looking at the threats posed by warming and erosion to Kivalina, Shishmaref and many other villages as well as Newtok. The magazine also addresses the extraordinary costs of doing something about it. The magazine’s piece says the dilemma of a village tied to sinking ground is partly a product of modernization. “You know, our people, in the past, didn’t have this kind of problem,” Tony Weyiouanna Sr. of Shishmaref told Alaska Magazine. “We’d be able to relocate our community, but … we’ve gotten so dependent on Western resources now …”

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Bowheads, humpbacks and Japan hold center stage. The International Whaling Commission meeting convened in Anchorage on Monday with a plea from Sen. Ted Stevens for renewal of the five-year subsistence bowhead quota for Alaska Native villages along the North Slope and on St. Lawrence Island. Japan says it won’t oppose the Alaska subsistence harvest this year but riled anti-whaling groups and nations with a plan to take 50 humpbacks in an Antarctic hunt. News coverage around the globe, from the BBC to Australia’s The Age. Even Al-Jazeera weighed in, with a report apparently gleaned from wire services. Closer to home: AP, KTUU, APRN, Reuters, KTVA, KIMO and ADN.

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Warming Arctic may heat up the IWC meeting, too. Delegates from 75 member nations may find themselves drawn into the debates about how warmer water and shrinking ice will affect whales and other marine mammals in coming decades, Far North Science says. Some of the effects likely will be direct, as some types of whales, like polar bears and walrus, find reliable foraging areas drawing away with the edge of the icepack, the science blog says, citing a report called Whales in Hot Water by biologists with the World Wildlife Fund and the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society. Less ice probably will mean more pressure on the animals from human activity in the Arctic, too, including commercial shipping, the study says.

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BP faces challenges from North Slope to the Caribbean. The Chicago Tribune had a long, thorough and pretty darned interesting story Sunday about BP and the man in charge of the company’s American operations, Robert Malone. From pipeline leaks at Prudhoe Bay to a deadly refinery explosion in Texas to delays in bringing a big new gulf coast platform on line, the Tribune’s story says, “rarely has one company faced such grave trouble at so many places in such a thin slice of time.”

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Ridin’ down the Alyeska trail. A group called Veteran Trail Riders of Alaska plans to take the 800-mile pipeline road from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez this summer, the Frontiersman reports. On horseback. The event planned to begin July 4 is a fundraiser, the paper says. The money will help pay to send Alaska military vets to the 25th anniversary of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington D.C. this fall, The Frontiersman says.

MORE ALASKA HEADLINES:

- Veteran, well-known aviator dies. Juneau Empire

- Galena boarding school gets military buildings. Fairbanks News-Miner

- Ice Alaska looks for a new landlord. Fairbanks News-Miner